Quotes & Sayings About Truths

In this age, there is no substitute for Christianity. That was the religion of the founders of the republic, and they expected it to remain the religion of their descendants. The great, vital and conservative element in our system is the belief of our people in the pure, doctrines and divine truths of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. — United States House Judiciary Committee Of Congress 1854

many truths we regard as immutable are, in fact, surprisingly context dependent. — Matthew Woodring Stover

The Rochester group [of VOTF], however, was met with some concern as they found it hard to believe my account as it unfolded before them. I feel that some people have a hard time with the truths around us, not only the sexual abuse by priests, but all bad things. I call it chosen ignorance. This modified form of ignorance is found in people who, if confronted with certain truths realize that they have to accept them and thereby acknowledge evil, and that scares them. Opening up and letting the truth in might knock them off their perceived center. It is too hard, period.
(VOTF - Voice of the Faithful - a Catholic group that wants to change the Church, keep the faith.) — Charles L. Bailey Jr.

Fine lies beat tedious truths every time. — Joe Abercrombie

The real truth lies below the surface. — Bohdi Sanders

Our sanity depends essentially on a narrowness of vision
the ability to select the elements vital to survival, while ignoring the great truths. — Josephine Hart

There are some truths to some of the stories, but a lot of it isn't - you just have got to let it go. — Charlotte Church

That 'change makes us uncomfortable' is now one of the most widely promoted, widely accepted, and under-considered half-truths around. [I]t is not change by itself that makes us uncomfortable; it is not even change that involves taking on something very difficult. Rather, it is change that leaves us feeling defenseless before the dangers we 'know' to be present that causes us anxiety. — Robert Kegan

Take risks, fall, get hurt and then take more risks. Stay away from those who affirm truths, who criticise those who do not think like them, people who have never once taken a step unless they were sure they would be respected — Paulo Coelho

Fiction and nonfiction are not so easily divided. Fiction may not be real, but it's true; it goes beyond the garland of facts to get to emotional and psychological truths. — Yann Martel

Cynics know the answers without having penetrated deeply enough to know the questions. When challenged by mysterious truths, they marshall 'facts. — Marilyn Ferguson

History warns us that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions. — Thomas Henry Huxley

Teddy grinned again. 'Truths are dangerous,' he said.
-'Then why are you writing them in a book?'
-'To catch them between the pages,' said Teddy, 'and trap them before they disappear.'
-'If they're dangerous, why not let them disappear?'
-'Because when truths disappear, they leave behind blank spaces, and that is also dangerous. — Kristin Cashore

Art keeps its newness because it's at once unforgettable and impossible to remember entirely. Art is too volatile, multiple and evaporative to hold on to. It's more chemical reaction, one you have to re-create each time, than a substance. Art's discoveries are also, almost always, counter to ordinary truths. — Jane Hirshfield

I have learned as a journalist that if you look long enough and hard enough and carefully enough, most truths are discoverable. — Edward Klein

Justifying faith is not a naked assent to the truths of the gospel. — William Gurnall

She had a fierce pleasure in the idea of telling Margaret unwelcome truths, in the shape of performance of duty. — Elizabeth Gaskell

When all is done, you must look in your own heart to know the truth. It lies at some middle depth, half-truths above, half-truths below. Even my truth, what I tell you know, is colored to fit my vision. Find your own truths as best you can, only remember that few are courageous enough to tell a tale of which they are not the hero. — Alida Van Gores

Equipped for battle Golden truths — Sunday Adelaja

Understanding of divine truths preserves and protects a man in any situation. — Sunday Adelaja

Silent lies are more venomous than cruel truths — Ben Oliveira

Small truths have greater power than big lies. — Matshona Dhliwayo

The world is full of opinions. But I am not searching for opinions, I'm searching for truths. — Richelle E. Goodrich

Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, they contain pure truths, before we cluttered our languages with so many useless words. — Cassandra Clare

Many philosophers in the second half of the 20th century really seemed to think that they were laying the foundations for science by laying down the conceptual (necessary) truths. — Patricia Churchland

I am. I'm rude because I don't conform to society's standards that white lies are inconsequential. I don't believe in hiding behind words that aren't truthful. I'm an impatient man. I don't beat around the bush. If you ask me something, I won't lie to you. — Whitney Barbetti

Questioning authority doesn't make you resistant; who should follow blindly without knowing the destination — LDarnell

Utopias are often just premature truths. — Alphonse De Lamartine

The higher you rise, the dirtier it gets. — J.M. August

truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins. We still do not know where the urge for truth comes from; for as yet we have heard only of the obligation imposed by society that it should exist: to be truthful means using the customary metaphors - in moral terms: the obligation to lie according to a fixed convention, to lie herd-like in a style obligatory for all. . . . — Friedrich Nietzsche

It is unlikely that someone could proclaim "truths" that are counter to physical laws for very long (for example, that it is healthy for children to run around in bathing suits in winter and in fur coats in summer) without appearing ridiculous. But it is perfectly normal to speak of the necessity of striking and humiliating children and robbing them of their autonomy, at the same time using such high-sounding words as chastising, upbringing, and guiding onto the right path. — Alice Miller

The works of the great artists are silent books of eternal truths. — Stefan Zweig

It's so hard to write about countries like Haiti because there's truths behind the misperceptions people have. But there's so much more. There are multiple truths. — Roxane Gay

Our sins are forgiven and we are accepted as righteous by God because of both the sinless life and sin-bearing death of our Lord Jesus Christ. There is no greater motivation for dealing with sin in our lives than the realization of these two glorious truths of the gospel. — Jerry Bridges

I had become conscious of my physicality, aware of my presence and open to the ugly truths of the world. At the age of thirteen, I realised that there was a danger in innocence and beauty, and I could not live with both. — Tracey Emin

There are still truths in the Bible and many other ancient texts despite what religions have done to destroy and debase them. Religious dogma and myth have been used very successfully either to suppress understanding or to twist the truth sufficiently to turn something positive into something negative. — David Icke

Learning to write is not a linear process. There is no logical A-to-B-to-C way to become a good writer. One neat truth about writing cannot answer it all. There are many truths. To do writing practice means to deal ultimately with your whole life. — Natalie Goldberg

The vain presumption of understanding everything can have no other basis than never having understood anything. For anyone who had ever experienced just once the perfect understanding of one single thing, and had truly tasted how knowledge is accomplished, would recognize that of the infinity of other truths he understands nothing. — Galileo Galilei

The difference between the truth of God and revelation is very simple. Truth is where God's been. Revelation is where God is. Truth is God's tracks. It's His trail, His path, but it leads to what? It leads to Him. Perhaps the masses of people are happy to know where God's been, but true God chasers are not content just to study God's trail, His truths; they want to know Him. They want to know where He is and what He's doing right now. — Tommy Tenney

Dont shoot the messenger for revealing uncomfortable truths. — Julian Assange

When once passion takes part in the game, the human reason, unassisted by Grace, has about as much chance of retaining its hold on truths already gained as a snowflake has of retaining its consistency in the mouth of a blast furnace. — C.S. Lewis

Between the sands of time is a multitude of truths untold. — Jason E. Royle

All truths begin as hearsay, as far as I'm concerned. — Matt Drudge

I don't know where I'm going on this path. I don't know what I'm doing with my life. You had to be lost, before you could be found. These are the truths. You had to be confused, before you could find clarity; you had to suffer, before you could find peace. These were the only ways, life could happen. Of course you were confused before you found clarity. If you weren't confused, then you would already be clear. Of course you were lost before you were found. If you were already found, then you wouldn't be lost. Of course there would be suffering before peace. If there was already peace, then there wouldn't be suffering. One necessarily came before the other. — T. Scott McLeod

Relative truths can also be absolute.
Relative absolute truths are like two people looking at the same coin, from two different sides, each sees a different truth and presumes they are looking at the same coin, and yet neither side can see the third side. — Caesar J. B. Squitti

Theory must mediate between all previous truths and certain new experiences — William James

Only a very bad theologian would confuse the certainty that follows revelation with the truths that are revealed. They are entirely different things. — Denis Diderot

Rules you can bend give you nothing to lean on. — Rachel Seiffert

He who is conversant with the supernal powers will not worship these inferior deities of the wind, waves, tide, and sunshine. Butwe would not disparage the importance of such calculations as we have described. They are truths in physics because they are true in ethics. — Henry David Thoreau

No one talked about the questions, because talking ruined plausible deniability. Talking burst the bubble of innocence. Talking ended the happily ever after. These were the truths they believed. And they were lies. They should have talked while there was still something to say. — Courtney C. Stevens

This is how you explain how you feel: broken words and hard truths. — R. YS Perez

Prayer does not blind us to the world, but it transforms our vision of the world, and makes us see it, all men, and all the history of mankind, in the light of God. To pray 'in spirit and in truth' enables us to enter into contact with that infinite love, that inscrutable freedom which is at work behind the complexities and the intricacies of human existence. This does not mean fabricating for ourselves pious rationalizations to explain everything that happens. It involves no surreptitious manipulation of the hard truths of life. — Thomas Merton

C. H. Spurgeon was once asked if he could reconcile these two truths to each other. "I wouldn't try," he replied; "I never reconcile friends." Friends? - yes, friends. This is the point that we have to grasp. In the Bible, divine sovereignty and human responsibility are not enemies. They are not uneasy neighbors; they are not in an endless state of cold war with each other. They are friends, and they work together. — J.I. Packer

Each soul or entity will and does return, or cycle, as does nature in its manifestations about man; thus leaving, making or presenting-as it were-those infallible, indelible truths that it -Life-is continuous. — Edgar Cayce

Science cannot promise eternal truths; only the elimination of false hypotheses and the establishment of what is currently the most likely explanation of an aspect of reality — David Filkin

One of the most essential truths to recognize is the fact that the only limits on what we can achieve in life are those we create and place on ourselves. Circumstances are the creation of people and not the other way around. — Robin S. Sharma

I have tried to keep some hold on the religion of my youth by interpreting its basic doctrines as symbols that gave popular expression to philosophic truths. I can rephrase "original sin" as man's inherited disposition to follow those instincts of pugnacity, sexual promiscuity, and greed which may have been necessary in the hunting stage of human history, but which need a variety of controls in an organized society that guarantees its members protection against violence, theft, and rape; we are born with the taint of ancestral passions in our blood. — Will Durant

Stories are amazing and powerful because they can resonate with people depending on their needs and experiences and speak truths we need to hear in that moment in time. — Sue Monk Kidd

Giants bleed like everybody else. — Dan Groat

Being a philosophical naturalist does not mean that one thinks that science can provide all of the answers. That is scientism and that is wrong. I don't think a billion buckets of science could speak to the problems raised by the Tea Party. Being a philosophical naturalist does not mean that one thinks that the only truths are those of science. I think the claim just made in the last sentence is true but I don't think it is a claim of science. It means that you use science where you can and you respect and try to emulate its standards. — Michael Ruse

You can be sure that your deepest desires reveal important truths about your spiritual condition. — Tullian Tchividjian

To me, the work I do is a means of interpreting unsettling truths, of bearing witness, and of sounding an alarm. The beauty of formal representation both carries an affirmation of life and subversively brings us face to face with news from our besieged world. — Richard Misrach

Darks drifts covered the horizon. A strange shadow approaching nearer and nearer, was spreading little by little over men, over things, over ideas; a shadow which came from indignations and from systems. All that had been hurriedly stifled was stirring and fermenting. Sometimes the conscious of the honest man caught its breath, there was so much confusion in that air in which sophisms were mingled with truths. Minds trembled in the social anxiety like leaves at the approach of the storm. The electric tension was so great that at certain moments any chance-comer, thought unknown, flashed out. Then the twilight darkness fell again. At intervals, deep and sullen mutterings enabled men to judge of the amount of lightning in the cloud. — Victor Hugo

As the highly colored birds do not fly around in the dull, leaden plains of a sandy desert, but amid all the settings of nature's leaves and blossoms, and lights and shades - nature's framework of their picture - so there are truths which do not appear well in arid fields of philosophic inquiry, but which demand the colored air and the bowers of poetry to be the setting of their charms. — David Swing

I don't want to know about love.'
'But you should, my child. You need to know about love. The things people will do for love. All truths come down to love, do they not? One way or another, they do. See, there is a difference between love and need. Sometimes, what you feel is immediate and without rhyme or reason.' She sat up a little straighter. 'Two people see each across a room or their skin brushes. Their souls recognize the person as their own. It doesn't need time to figure it. The soul always knows ... whether it's right or wrong. — Jennifer L. Armentrout

Enter the streets that you have never been to for the sake of the concealed beauties and the hidden truths! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

My memory of the school building itself, its rooms and lockers, blackboards, and hallways, bring on a heavy, oppressive feeling. Whether I was more unhappy in school than any of my friends I don't know. I never would have said I didn't like school, and there are moments I distinctly remember enjoying, but these truths don't alter my memory of that place. — Siri Hustvedt

There are great truths at the foundation of Freemasonry, truths which it is its mission to teach and which is constituting the very essence of, that sublime system which gives the venerable institution its peculiar identity as a science of morality, and it behooves every disciple diligently to ponder and inwardly digest. — Albert Pike

There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil. — Alfred North Whitehead

When we read with attention the poetical and philosophical monuments of the East
above all, those of India, which are beginning to spread in Europe
we discover there many a truth, and truths so profound, and which make such a contrast with the meanness of the results at which European genius has sometimes stopped, that we are constrained to bend the knee before the philosophy of the East, and to see in this cradle of the human race the native land of the highest philosophy. — Victor Cousin

What I can tell your grace is that it deals with truths, and they are truths so appealing and elegant that no lies can equal them. — Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

[T]he young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.
He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands. — William Faulkner

Writing, therefore, is also an act of courage. How much easier is it to lead an unexamined life than to confront yourself on the page? How much easier is it to surrended to materialism or cynicism or to a hundred other ways of life that are, in fact, ways to hide from life and from our fears. When we write, we resist the facile seduction of theses simpler roads. We insist on finding out and declaring the truths that we find, and we dare to out those truths on the page. — Jack Heffron

It remains an astonishing, disturbing fact that in America - a nation where nearly every new drug is subjected to rigorous scrutiny as a potential carcinogen, and even the bare hint of a substance's link to cancer ignites a firestorm of public hysteria and media anxiety - one of the most potent and common carcinogens known to humans can be freely bought and sold at every corner store for a few dollars. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

The rules and principles of case law have never been treated as final truths but as working hypotheses, continually retested in those great laboratories of the law, the courts of justice. Every new case is an experiment, and if the accepted rule which seems applicable yields a result which is felt to be unjust, the rule is reconsidered. — Benjamin N. Cardozo

Free speech is essential to education, especially to a liberal education, which encourages the search for truths in art and science. If expression is restricted, the range of inquiry is also curtailed ... The beneficiaries of a free society have a duty to pursue the truth and to protect the freedom of expression that makes possible the search for a new enlightenment. — Norman Dorsen

All too often, legacy management practices reflexively perpetuate the past - by over-weighting the views of long-tenured executives, by valuing conformance more highly than creativity and by turning tired industry nostrums into sacred truths. — Gary Hamel

Instead of clinging to the only Lifeboat that can save, we have tossed overboard biblical truths in the name of [compromise], living on the edge of life, like the man who rides the parameter of a hurricane, daring it to sweep him away. — Billy Graham

The usefullest truths are plainest; and while we keep to them, our differences cannot rise high. — William Penn

All God's revelations are sealed to us until they are opened to us by obedience. You will never get them open by philosophy or thinking. Immediately you obey, a flash of light comes. Let God's truth work in you by soaking in it, not by worrying into it. Obey God in the thing He is at present showing you, and instantly the next thing is opened up. We read tomes on the work of the Holy Spirit when ... five minutes of drastic obedience would make things clear as a sunbeam. We say, "I suppose I shall understand these things some day." You can understand them now: it is not study that does it, but obedience. The tiniest fragment of obedience, and heaven opens up and the profoundest truths of God are yours straight away. God will never reveal more truth about Himself till you obey what you know already. Beware of being wise and prudent. — Oswald Chambers

We face challenges pushing us in a million directions all the time, whether we're being pulled to hide our truths or pushed to compromise our integrity. The more we are connected to our true selves, the more whole we are. The more whole we are, the stronger we are to navigate our own life. — Elaina Marie

If we're by ourselves we come to feel crazy and alone. We need to make alternate families of small groups of women who support each other, talk to each other regularly, can speak their truths and their experiences and find they're not alone in them, that other women have them, too ... It makes such a huge difference. — Gloria Steinem

The process of living seems to consist in coming to realize truths so ancient and simple that, if stated, they sound like barren platitudes. — C.S. Lewis

I realize that humans cannot bear very much reality. Most lives are a flight from selfhood. Most prefer the truths of the stable. You stick your heads into the stanchions and munch contentedly until you die. Others use you for their purposes. Not once do you live outside the stable to lift your head and be your own creature. Muad'Dib came to tell you about that. Without understanding his message, you cannot revere him! — Frank Herbert

Change is vital to any actor. If you keep playing lead after lead, you're really gonna dry up. Because all those vehicles wean you away from the truths of human behaviour. — Gary Oldman

There were as many truths - overlapping, stewed together - as there were tellers. The truth mattered less than the story's life. A story forgotten died. A story remembered not only lived, but grew. — Patrick Ness

We see a promise as a personal law, and we see the people who break them as private-life criminals. We think it automatically, one of those truths that just is to us: breaking a promise is a bad, bad thing. A promise can be as buoyant as whispered words or solemn as a marriage vow, but we view it as something pure and untouchable when it should never be either of those things. If a promise is a personal law, a contract, then it ought to be layered with fine print, rules and conditions, promises within those promises, and whether we like it or not, it ought to be something we can snatch back, that we should snatch back, if those rules are violated. — Deb Caletti

There is a sense of exhilaration that comes from facing head-on the hard truths and saying, "We will never give up. We will never capitulate. It might take a long time, but we will find a way to prevail." — James C. Collins

If the fundamental principles in the Declaration of Independence, as self-evident truths, are real truths, the existence of slavery, in any form, is a wrong. — John Quincy Adams

The truths that are found in the Bible are universal truths. And it shapes who you are and guides you throughout your life. — Ernie Hudson

Science is always simple and always profound. It is only the half-truths that are dangerous. — George Bernard Shaw

Even a liar tells a hundred truths to one lie; he has to, to make the lie good for anything. — Henry Ward Beecher

So the professor takes the student's point seriously, and responds with a concise but adequate argument in defence of the disputed equation. The professor tries hard to show no sign of being irritated by criticism from so lowly a source. Most of the questions from the floor will have the form of criticisms which, if valid, would diminish or destroy the professor's life's work. But bringing vigorous and diverse criticism to bear on accepted truths is one of the very purposes of the seminar. Everyone takes it for granted that the truth is not obvious, and that the obvious need not be true; that ideas are to be accepted or rejected according to their content and not their origin; that the greatest minds can easily make mistakes; and that the most trivial-seeming objection may be the key to a great new discovery. — David Deutsch

Wise statesmen ... established these great self-evident truths, that when in the distant future some man, some faction, some interest, should set up the doctrine that none but rich men, or none but white men, were entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, their posterity should look up again at the Declaration of Independence and take courage to renew the battle which their fathers began ... — Abraham Lincoln

This is one of the truths of the influence industry in Britain: lobbyists are central to the process of government. To see lobbyists as separate and external to the system is a mistake. Rather than being parasitical, lobbyists should more accurately be viewed as essential to it, subsidising it even. As lobbying activity has increased, so our government has become ever more dependent on lobbyists to function. 'Our vaunted constitution is really a framework of lobbying', Austin Mitchell MP remarked twenty years ago.18 — Tamasin Cave

The kinds of truth that art gives us many, many times are small truths. They don't have the resonance of an encyclical from the Pope stating an eternal truth, but they partake of the quality of eternity. There is a sort of timeless delight in them. — Seamus Heaney

It seems to me like there are a million truths out there, depending on who tells them. — Heidi Ayarbe

Perhaps the most significant event in the evolution of the liberated mind arrives with the realization that most people, even in their deepest convictions, are blind to most truths. — Nathaniel Dean

Believe these truths as you believe any other statements, for the difference between ordinary faith and saving faith lies mainly in the subjects in which it is placed. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

There are great scholars and wonderful teachers all over the world. Many of them humbly and effectively teach truth, but others do not. God gives us the gift of the Holy Ghost so we can discern what is true and what is not, and He expects us to seek truth wherever we can find it. Temple truths are a marvelous measuring rod by which we can measure everything else. — John H. Groberg